Interesting quotations

On topics: Caring & Compassion andChange

Caring and compassion:

Amazon.com book review of Rob Bell and Don Golden's
book "Jesus
wants to save Christians: A manifesto for the church in exile:" It
is unusually brief. "There is a church not too far from us that recently added
a $25 million addition to their building. Our local newspaper ran a front-page
story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our
city lives in poverty. This is a book about those two numbers."

Karen Armstrong: "Here in America, religious people often
prefer to be right rather than compassionate. They've lost the Axial Age
vision of concern for everybody."

George Washington Carver: "How far you go in life depends on
your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic
with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in
life you will have been all of these."

Tony Campolo: "I have three things I'd like to say to you
tonight. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of
starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't
give a s--t. Third: what's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I
said s--t than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night."

Albert Einstein: "A human being is a part of the whole called by us
universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his
thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us,
restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons
nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by
widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the
whole of nature in its beauty."

Dwight Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made ever warship launched,
ever rocket fired signifies in the final sense; a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed.

Tich Nhat Hanh: "Every day forty thousand children die in the world for lack of food. We who overeat in the West, who are feeding grains to animals to make meat, are eating the flesh of these children."

The Dalai Lama:

"Compassion is something really worthwhile. It is not just a religious or spiritual subject, not a matter of ideology. It is not a luxury, it is a necessity."

"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."

Philo: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

Rumi: "I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion... and where it isn't, that's where my work lies."

Teresa of Avila: "Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no
hands but yours,
no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which is to look out Christ's
compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about
doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now."

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Change:

About God, commas and periods:

Gracie Allen: "Never place a period where God has placed a
comma." From a note to her husband, George Burns, that he
allegedly found after her death. 1 The United Church of Christ based its "God is Still Speaking"
advertising campaign on this concept. It was launched at 2004-Advent.

Pat Robertson: "Never
place a comma where God has placed a period. God has spoken!" 2

Anon: "Everybody loves progress but nobody likes change."

Anon: "Progress happens one funeral at a time."

Anon: "All we can hope for is that the next generation
will be a little less sexist, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic than the
last."

Anon: From the Jewish tradition, an entry in Midrash Tanhuma, Mishpatim 2: "If a person of learning participates in public affairs and serves as judge or arbiter, he gives stability to the land… But if he sits in his home and says to himself, ‘What have the affairs of society to do with me?... Why should I trouble myself with the people’s voices of protest? Let my soul dwell in peace!’—if he does this, he overthrows the world."

William Sloane Coffin: senior minister, Riverside Church,
NYC: "The sense of fulfillment which comes with being in the right fight is
a very wonderful thing." 3

Charles Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species
that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to
change."

Marian Wright Edelman: "A lot of people are waiting for
Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back but they are gone. We
are it. It is up to us. It is up to you."

Albert Einstein: "There is a race between mankind and the
universe. Mankind is trying to build bigger, better, faster, and more
foolproof machines. The universe is trying to build bigger, better, and
faster fools. So far the universe is winning."

Jerahmiel S. Grafstein: "All progress is by a winding staircase." Spoken in a debate in the Canadian
Senate on a bill to legalize same-sex marriage. 4

Ghandi:

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they attack you, then you win."

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Eric Hoffer: "In a time of drastic change, it is the
learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves
equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."

Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of
thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only
thing that ever has."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"One of the great liabilities of life is that all too many
people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and
yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental
responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a
revolution."

(From his "I Have a Dream" speech,
1963-AUG-28): Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of
bitterness and hatred. We must ever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and
discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.
Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul
force."

David Knight, a spokesman for the Michigan Militia: "There
are three methods to effect change: the jury box, the ballot box, and the
cartridge box".

John Stuart Mill: "The despotism of custom is everywhere the
standing hindrance to human advancement."

Thomas Paine: ""It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy." 5

Stephen Post: "The surest way to predict the future is
to invent it." 6

Gola Wolf Richards: "Understanding the nature of change, changes
the nature of understanding."

R.J. Rushdoony: "History has never been dominated by
majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally
on their faith."

Mother Theresa: "So often people say that we should look to
elderly, learn from their wisdom, their many years. I disagree, I say
we should look to the young: untarnished, without stereotypes implanted in
their minds, no poison, no hatred in their hearts. When we learn to
see life through the eyes of a child, that is when we become truly wise."

Andy Warhol:"They say that time changes things. But you actually have to change them yourself."

Claire Wolfe:"America is at that awkward stage. It's too
late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."